Time Expired (9 page)

I exited Records Management and sat, taken aback at how clearly I recalled Madeleine’s words to me so many years ago, and how they still pissed me off.

By five o’clock I had twenty-nine reports, all of which tried to make the affair look better than it had been. But the form doesn’t allow for much editorializing, and from the impression I had at the end of the twenty-ninth, none of the Hostage Negotiation guys had much of a future in fiction.

I glanced through the report from Tim, the D.D. clerk. He’d run both Madeleine Riordan and Michael Alan Wennerhaver through CORPUS, for countywide arrest data, the Police Information Network (PIN) for statewide warrants, NCIC (Nationwide PIN) and CLETS to check for stolen property. Both came up clean. It looked like the only infractions either of them had were Madeleine’s parking tickets, and she’d have gotten them too long ago to be on file.

At five twenty Grayson’s report was still outstanding. I made my way past reception to Grayson’s desk.

I was surprised to find him there. “Grayson, I left you a message.” I could have been more diplomatic.

“I was out.” Him, too.

“I need your report.”

He glanced at his watch. “Not possible. I’ll get it to you tomorrow morning. I—”

“Now, Grayson. Doyle needs it today.”

“Smith, it’s nearly five thirty.”

“Twenty-nine of the thirty are done.”

Grayson, a whiz at bureaucratic politics, understood the implication of that. He looked up, his forehead shirred with anger he couldn’t unleash. “I’ll dictate it. Get the D.D. clerk to type it up in the morning.”

I let a moment pass, in part to control my own anger, mostly to tacitly remind him that sergeants don’t give orders to detectives. “Tim’s got his own work. Make what arrangements you need, Grayson, but have the report to me by seven-thirty.”

As I started to turn, he muttered something.

Slowly, I turned back. “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite make that out.”

“Nothing.”

I glared down and said softly, “It wasn’t nothing, Grayson. I’ve dealt with adolescents. I’ve seen this routine. And I know that you’re planning to do the report and to keep me waiting. So, let me tell you now, I have to leave at seven forty-five to get back to that nursing home on the canyon ridge to see a woman who is dying. I don’t plan to wait around while you sulk over this.” Grayson’s eyes widened and his whole face—color and expression—faded. “If your report’s not in by then, the file goes without it.”

“I’ll call you if—”

“I won’t be back till quarter after.” I headed to the parking lot, congratulating myself on neither stalking angrily away nor slamming anything, and on leaving myself plenty of time to handle a last-minute surprise from Grayson and still make my eight-thirty appointment with Madeleine Riordan. It wasn’t till I hit the night air that I realized I’d sauntered out without a jacket. The night air cooled the heat of victory.

I met Howard for dinner at DaNang, the Vietnamese place on San Pablo with the wonderful prawn satay. If it hadn’t been for Grayson I could have gone straight on to the nursing home instead of driving across town. It was close to eight o’clock when I got back to the station. I didn’t bother to put my purse down in the office—just checked my IN box. No report. I pulled out the cover sheet for the Hostage Negotiation file and penciled in Grayson’s name under Reports Outstanding, and headed for Doyle’s office.

At the top of the stairs I saw Grayson walking away from Doyle’s office. I walked into the empty anteroom. Grayson’s report was on top of the IN box.

Grayson had indeed stretched the deadline even longer than I had expected. But two can be adolescent. Without changing the cover sheet, I plopped the file on top of his report.

Then I headed down to the patrol car and drove to see Madeleine Riordan.

I
WOULD HAVE LIKED
to drive up to the Kensington shopping area and down by the top of Cerrito Canyon to survey the hostage scene from last night. But I was already late for my appointment with Madeleine Riordan. She wasn’t going anywhere, but she also wasn’t one to overlook delinquency in arrival time. I’ve lived in Berkeley too long to be put out by lateness (twenty minutes late is de rigueur here), but every so often I find a trace of my stiff-backed grandmother coming out in me.
She
had no tolerance for tardiness (or much else, for that matter). It’s something of a cosmic joke that the traits I hated most in her have woven their way into my own fibers. For the month after I first discovered this errant thread in my weave, I was no less than half an hour late for everything but work. At the end of that month Howard made a point of telling me how taxing personal evolution is to friends and lover. I turned down San Antonio Road and made my way along the narrow winding street between parked cars, wondering if this trip would be worth the hassle. Surely Madeleine Riordan would not come up empty. Pride would force her to honor her part of the bargain. (Even my grandmother never invited anyone in without offering them a piece of cake, albeit the driest confection they might ever have forced down.) What would Madeleine’s dry slice be? A lecture on the proper conduct of the police force in the investigation? Too blatant. Grandma wouldn’t have thrown the cake at a visitor. No, Madeleine’s slice of information could be a coterie of kids she’d seen in the canyon (who would probably know nothing and take up gobs of our time). Or perhaps she’d offer an observation on meter maid ritual she’d had during the period she had amassed all those tickets. In fact, my guess was that when she asked me to come tonight, she hadn’t had anything more in mind than warding off the demons of isolation. For most of us demons wave their banners of fear in the middle of the night. The Four Horsemen of four
A.M.
Maybe when you’re dying and alone they ride all the time.

The wind had picked up with the setting of the sun. Now at ten after nine it snapped the fronds of the fan palms in front of the Mediterranean-looking pink stucco building. Light from Michael’s office windows hung above the path illuminating the top of the shrubs at the property line but making the footing not much clearer. Madeleine’s cottage was no more than fifteen feet beyond, as the crow swoops, but the grade was so steep that the roof was below my line of vision.

The wood cottage had the look of a Bernard Maybeck house, a little gem tossed playfully out of sight of the road. More accurately, it was two rough-shingled studios joined by a red Japanese temple gate arch that crested the companionway.

I made my way down the sloping cement path to the companionway and stood a moment. The doors to both rooms were shut. Beyond, in the canyon, oak and bay and eucalyptus leaves rustled and the smell of pine wafted up. Or maybe that was Madeleine’s floor wax from inside. I was about to knock when Coco ran toward me, tail wagging, a yard-long gray dowel in his mouth. Dropping his stick he poked me, demanding to be petted.

“So you remember me, do you? Or is this how you greet all Madeleine’s … friends?” Even though I was alone with the dog, my voice caught at the designation of “friend.” Not right, but not altogether wrong, either. And a silly point to get caught on.

“Maybe,” I said to him, “you’ve discovered something down there in the canyon and brought me up a clue, huh? Maybe that’s what Madeleine’s going to tell me.”

The big dog shoved in front of me, thrusting his nose against the door. I knocked. I couldn’t hear an answer. I hesitated. In care facilities like this a knock was merely a formality; the right to keep people out was one patients forfeited. There were practical reasons, of course, but suddenly it seemed so demeaning to have people invading your privacy at will. I knocked again, louder. When she didn’t answer, I put aside my just-defined principles and turned the knob.

I barely had the door open when Coco pushed in and ran around Madeleine’s bed. I heard him bound up. The room was dark. She must have been asleep. She’d forgotten all about my coming. Or she’d taken pain medication. Or … I gave Madeleine a moment to wake up and adjust to Coco. Vaguely, I wondered if there would come a time when she was too delicate to be bounced around like that.

“Madeleine, it’s Jill Smith.”

She gave a soft groan. Or was that Coco?

“It’s Jill Smith, from the police. Do you want me to come back another time?”

When she didn’t answer I said, “I’m going to turn on the light.”

I felt for the switch, flipped it on, and walked in. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the light, for me to see Madeleine’s deep blue eyes staring blankly, her bare hairless head hung uncomfortably to the right, her translucently pale skin drooping over her cheekbones like a shroud. I watched Coco push at a hand that didn’t move, then roll in against legs that would no longer feel the comfort of his presence.

She was dead; I’d seen enough of death to recognize it. But I couldn’t believe
Madeleine
was dead, not now, not when we were going to talk, not … I turned away, squeezing my eyes shut, tightening my muscles till my neck was so tight I couldn’t swallow. I had to give my head a sharp shake to force myself out of the shock.

The bowels evacuate with the relaxation of death. Now I could smell the effects, slight but evident even over the pine wax smell. Bypassing her wrist, I pressed my fingers against Madeleine’s carotid artery. Nothing. I knew there would be no pulse, but I had to try. Her skin was clammy, but not noticeably cold. Now I looked more carefully at her face. Her skin was not merely translucently pale, but blue—cyanotic. And around those dark blue irises were red dots—petechial hemorrhages from broken blood vessels. Both could be the result of asphyxia.

The end of her pillow was shoved in behind her head, but most of it hung to this side. In the middle of the pillowcase were marks of fluid that looked like saliva and blood, marks just where they would be if someone pressed that pillow over her face until she stopped breathing.

I stared angrily. How could anyone … Coco was pushing in harder against her, poking her leg with his snout. He was disturbing the scene. I should have moved him, but I couldn’t bring myself to order him off the bed, not while he was nestled next to her as if she were still alive.

Her body was still warm. She couldn’t have been dead long. Not over an hour or two. “No!” I said, wanting to disbelieve what I saw and what I knew. But it was true: If I had arrived an hour or two earlier, Madeleine would have been alive. Maybe she would still be alive now. I felt like I’d been hit in the stomach. Madeleine was going to tell me something—probably. Was that why she was dead? If I had insisted she tell me last night … But no, surely not. The parking perp was a prankster. He wouldn’t suddenly kill a woman to avoid being arrested for crimes for which he’d be a local hero, maybe even a national star. Not a man who called the media with every prank he pulled. That conclusion comforted me a bit. But still, if I had …

No! I couldn’t play that game. I’d seen survivors run that script for years, over and over and over. No. Madeleine was dead. Maybe she suspected she would be killed. Maybe that was the reason she wanted me to come back now—because I was a homicide detective. Maybe she wanted me to find her killer.

Illogically I wanted to call the paramedics, have them pump a miracle into her veins. But I had seen too many bodies over the years to fool myself. They could do nothing for her and they’d ruin the evidence of her death in the process. Pulling a tissue from the bedside box, I lifted the receiver and called the dispatcher to have him notify Doyle and send Raksen, the lab tech, and the rest of a death scene team. He didn’t mention the coroner; neither did I. When the coroner comes, he doesn’t wait around. He takes the body and leaves. Later, when Raksen had taken every photograph, when he had bagged every fiber and dusted for every print, when we were done with the scene and the body, then I would call the coroner.

Coco was whining now, not a panicked whine, but merely a confused call for the attention that had never been denied him. I scratched his head and took one more look at Madeleine Riordan. It would be my last look at the woman I had just begun to know. After this she would have to be “the deceased,” “the body.”

Her head was hanging almost to her shoulder. I wanted to lift it up, to ease the pain she no longer felt, to make it okay. Amid the halo of her bare head her face seemed much too small. Her eyes were still drawn and deep pin lines slashed down into her upper lip. Most faces relax in death, but hers hadn’t. She looked like she couldn’t believe it had all ended like this.

I turned away, squeezed my eyes against tears.
This wasn’t the time for that!
And I wasn’t the person to grieve;
surely
she had closer friends than me. I stood like that longer than I’d intended, in silent good-bye. And somehow it seemed a fitting farewell to Madeleine Riordan: one lone person fighting desperately not to give in to emotion.

I gave my head another quick shake and turned back to the body. The mouth was open, but there was no sign of obstruction, nothing to suggest choking. I checked her hands but didn’t move them. If she had scratched her attacker, particles of skin or hair could still be embedded under her nails. The lab tech would bag her hands before moving her. In ten days to two weeks we’d get a report back on those particles. I scanned the arms. On the insides bruises had begun to form. She’d have been reaching up, flailing at her killer. And he’d smacked her arms away like dead limbs of an old plant. Then he’d pushed the pillow tighter over her nose and mouth. She didn’t look panicked now, but how could she not have been?

I swallowed hard and took a last look at her. It wouldn’t have taken a big man to smother her; a child could have done it. Her arms were so emaciated she couldn’t have fought off anyone. Her skin hung loose like … All the tears I’d fought back gushed out. I sobbed and ground the heels of my hands into my eyes as hard as I could. My whole body was shaking. What Madeleine looked like was the deflated dummy in the canyon last night, the dummy left there as a joke. What I was feeling now, I told myself, was all the anger and frustration I hadn’t had a chance to vent then. I knew there was more to it, but I concentrated on that, wiped my eyes, reminded myself that Doyle and Raksen would be here any moment. And I couldn’t let them see me like this. Not about any death, but especially not for Madeleine Riordan.